In this connection, one trifle should be mentioned which on looking over these minutes, I see I haven't got to. It crossed my mind at this point, as it had earlier in the day. I walked over and sat on the arm of a wing chair, staring out at the hot evening. New York often has a marine sky to which, being a seaport, it is entitled. That night the clouds were low and small--evenly spaced and of a size. When the sun hit them, it turned them several different colors--a dappled effect, like a peacock's tail in which orange, not iridescent blue-green, was the predominating tinge. It was getting on toward seven. I thought about my dollar-strewing habits and the fact that I probably wouldn't much reduce what funds I'd stored up myself and reluctantly but methodically amassed in the coffers of the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company. Tom-the-doctor had said the damned excrescence in my craw, if mortal, wouldn't be operable. That meant I wouldn't be lying around in some hospital, like so many of them, at umpteen bucks a day, while they slowly took out my neck. It meant, so far as I was concerned, that a day would come along when I would make up my mind the books no longer balanced. A day, that is, when pain or mechanical difficulties made it impossible to proceed with the prose. When I couldn't write any more. That day, I would have completed my best effort to get my affairs in order. I'd have seen the people I loved--and seen them before it was an ordeal for them to see me. I do not have a horror--but a kind of intellectual rage--over meaningless, agonizing, nonproductive, lingering existence. In my life, I've seen a great deal of it. I have seen people who were a stinking nursing problem twenty-four hours a day--who were afflicted with fantastic agony besides--and who implored their relatives, friends, and physicians to put them out of their misery--but who lived in that state for a couple of years. By taking a reasonable amount of thought, and through a certain amount of luck, I have avoided several of the pitfalls into which man persistently topples. Into others, I've all but pitched myself. But this was one I intended to skip. In the kit I carry for boat trips is a hypodermic syringe and a thin little bottle of morphine tablets. I've never had to use them on the broken leg, the gasoline burn, the leader-wire cut, for which they are always ready. But, when the day came which, in my judgment, would turn the balance of life, I knew precisely what I would do. I had always known, even before I had owned such gentle means. You dissolve all the tablets--five grains--and fill the barrel of the hypo. You jab yourself and push. Simple. The reader of these notes may therefore spare himself--as I spared myself--as all human beings should be spared--the anticipation of death dragged out excruciatingly by the miracles of science. That is one of the items on the gigantic ledger in which are gathered those details that prove modern man is mad.